Someone tell me more about "Hook Slider", a 1950s baseball adventure comic strip

 

I'm always on the lookout for original comic art. With comic books, I'm mostly interested in grabbing Fantastic Four-related pages, but in recent years, I've grabbed a number of comic strip art pages with one overlying criterion: does it look good? (Affordability is also something that sets a lot of comic strip art apart from many comic book pages.)

And thus we come across this very obscure 1950s baseball-adventure comic strip, Hook Slider. Beyond some very basic details about its theme, I can find next to nothing about this apparently short-lived strip, and so I'm here, late at night on the internet, to show off this new art purchase but to also see if anyone has more information about it.

The strip follows ballplayer Hook Slider, which is just about the best name for a baseball protagonist that I can think of, and one of the reasons I'm so interested in learning more.

You'll notice that "WEDN." is written in the top corner of the strip. A different panel tells me that this was published on January 26th, but it doesn't give me a year. If this was indeed a comic strip from the 1950s, then this particular strip was from 1955, the only year in the decade where the 26th falls on a Wednesday.

Our coach in the second panel is named "Mr. Dryver", another rock-solid baseball name, to go along with his rock-solid neck and haircut. If this isn't the epitome of a 1950s Danny Murtaugh-like head coach, I don't know what is.

Also, I wonder if Major League pitchers are still forbidden from bowling.

The reference to the Braves and Coach Dryver's Boston shirt makes me wonder if this strip used the names of actual Major League franchises. The Boston Braves had moved to Milwaukee by '55, if that is when this was published, so that might be why our coach is telling Slider that he was sent to Boston from the Braves. Of course, this might all be a coincidence.

Bob Sherry is the artist credited on this strip, and I'm having a similarly difficult time learning more about Sherry and his work. It seems he was a World War II pilot who worked for King Features for years, ghosting on strips like Red Ryder. This strip was published, as you can see in the second panel, by McNaught, a newspaper syndicate that operated from the 1920s until the '80s.

This is one of those strips that might be lost to time. There are a few strips available to purchase on eBay and the like, but none of the listings provide much more backstory. In some comic utopia, there'd be a collection of this series out there, but here and now, I'd settle for a little more info. 

My first "Helmet Thing" original comic art (please congratulate me)

In the early-to-mid-'90s, the Thing wore a helmet. This "battle damaged" Thing redesign made him, I suppose, both more extreme and more X-TREME, which fit for the time (though the helmet was originally designed by Jack Kirby and made a very brief appearance in the early issues of the Fantastic Four series). And while I hated the look at the time, I've come to feel a bit of nostalgic appreciation for it, though, to be clear, I NEVER EVER want the character to adopt the look again.

I've never been able to find any helmet Thing original artwork - at least, nothing I've been able to afford - but that streak came to an end recently when I managed to grab a page from Marvel's Cage series, which ran from 1992-93 and starred former FF member Luke Cage. Let's take a look at it! 

This is a great page for the following reasons: it's full of action, it prominently features the Thing, all of the dialogue balloons and sound effects are still pasted to the page, and most importantly, THE THING IS WEARING HIS HELMET.

Here's the cover to the issue from which this page comes. The Cage series ended with issue 20, so this is one of the final pages from the series.

In the issue, Luke Cage has been possessed by the villainous Bogeyman, and the Thing and the Human Torch set out to free him from the nefarious influence. The battle takes the three to the piers of New York City.

If I had to guess, I'd say the Bogeyman was meant to be Venom-like in its portrayal. The villain tries to possess the Thing, but OH-HO! It's not to be because of his VERY IMPORTANT HELMET! Nice!

The page is pencilled by Scott Benefiel and inked by Frank Turner. The letters come from John Roshell and Comicraft - the company had just been founded a year earlier. This is a very early example of digital lettering in the comic book industry. In this instance, the letters were printed, cut out, and pasted to the art board. I think it really adds something to the artwork, though I understand why it doesn't happen anymore. 

In the end, our Fantastic Four duo are victorious, mostly because the Thing punched a lot (and very well). I guess Johnny keeps Luke Cage from flying off into the stratosphere by flying up to grab him.

There's just one editorial note on this page, next to the last panel, and it's a note for the colorist to make Johnny's forearms blue, as he's turned off his flame to that part of his body as he grabs his pal Luke.

This is a really great page that makes a unique addition to the collection. It's my first page of original art with the Thing in his helmet! This is a reason to celebrate.

Here's some new Thing original artwork from Paradise X: Devils!

A number of years ago, I met writer Jim Krueger at a comic book convention. Krueger wrote one of my favorite Marvel alternate reality series, Earth X and its sequels, and I made sure that I let him know that - and also how much I enjoyed how he wrote the Thing in the book.

This spawned a rather frenetic conversation between the two of us, where we both said a number of things which all amounted to, "we love the Thing!" And so this was a great moment, and one that I'll always remember. He told me that he had to stop himself from giving the Thing all of the best lines and moments in the book, which I felt was unnecessary, because there's no reason to not make every (EVERY) book about the Thing.

This past October at the New York Comic Con, I sought out some original art vendors to look for a page or two that I might buy. Now, there are different tiers of original art vendors at comic conventions. Many of them sell Golden Age Superman pages for $30,000 or Will Eisner originals for $15,000. These booths are interesting to walk past, because they contain comic book history that I will never be able to afford, but I guess it's still nice to be able to see original Frank Miller Dark Knight Returns and Jack Kirby Fantastic Four pages in person. I imagine that the goal of these vendors is to sell one single page of art for the entire show, and then buy a car or something.

The other original art vendors at comic conventions have enormous stacks of pages and color guides from the 1990s Darkhawk series, probably bought from the original artist in 1997 for $1 per page, now on sale for $200 each. These are the booths where I generally spend time at, rummaging through binders and piles to see if somehow, there's a page that I can afford that also has the Thing knocking someone's block off.

On the last day of the '23 NYCC, I spent the waning hours of the convention looking for such a page, and I found a pretty good one.

It's a page from the Krueger-written Paradise X: Devils 2002 one shot by penciller Steve Sadowski and inker Andrew Pepoy!

Not only does the Thing appear on this page, but he appears in EVERY SINGLE PANEL. And not only does the Thing appear in every single panel, but it looks like there's more than one Thing present on this page. This is a great Thing-per-panel ratio. The smaller Things are actually Ben's alternate universe sons, Buzz and Chuck. They are honorary Things and they count.

Paradise X is set in an alternate future, and here he's joined by Reed Richards (minus an arm), Mr. S (Scott Summers), Daredevil and the reborn Mar-Vell. Even though this takes place in the future, the Thing looks the same as he always has, which is correct. He's also wearing his signature blue shorts.

Here's a panel with Buzz (or...Chuck), who wears glasses. Buzz and Chuck are the children of Ben and Alicia. There was radioactive clay involved.

The back of the page is pretty standard, with some copyright information stamped near the top and artist names in the corners.

I think that I got a good deal on this page. A lot of Things for my buck. That's a new saying that we're sticking with now.

Earth X was a great story. Things got a little bogged down in Universe X and Paradise X, though I enjoyed them both, as well as the more recent series, Marvel X. They're well worth tracking down if you haven't read them, because, if nothing else, you know that they're written by a Thing-loving author. And that should be enough.

About ten minutes before I left the convention, I found some very affordable art from Alex Sanchez (who drew in the Thing sketchbook at the show). Alex inked some pages in the TMNT: Armageddon Game series, and was selling some of the pages he worked on. By the time I found them, all of the pages with the four turtles were sold, but I still did pretty well with this action-packed page. It features none other than Metalhead, along with a Triceraton and some Utroms!

And then the show was over! Talk soon, everyone!

Fantastic Four: Trapped in the Data Vortex original art by Allan Patrick and Marcio Loezer

I have a soft spot for promotional comics. Most of 'em are cheesy and silly, but every once in a while, one surprises you and ends up being a sought-after book. Fantastic Four: Trapped in the Data Vortex is...absolutely not one of those books, but since it stars the FF, I naturally grabbed it when I could. A few weeks ago, all of the interior artwork from this eight-page story popped up on eBay, and I managed to get two of the pages. So let's take a look!

"Trapped in the Data Vortex" was published in 2011 as a promotional comic for Hitachi Data Systems. The story is about what you'd expect: the company is highlighted throughout the book, and the superhero action is just a thin cover for company promotion. The art, though, really stood out in this story. Publishers usually send in the B (or C) teams when packaging something like this, and books usually suffer as a result; even though Allan Patrick and Marcio Loezer aren't names I'm familiar with, they really knocked the art out of the park for this short story. Industry mainstay Greg Land provided the cover for this short comic.

The better of the two pages I got is the last page of the story, where the team (with indispensable help from Hitachi Data Systems!) wraps up their mini adventure. Ben, Sue and Johnny return from the Data Vortex to find that Reed has taken care of things in this dimension by dispatching M.O.D.O.K. and some AIM henchmen.

Even though I've got a decent number of original Fantastic Four pages, I don't often get pages with all four main characters on it, and to get a nice, half-page splash of some "off into the sunset" superhero action really adds to the deal. Plus, Johnny is on fire, Reed stretches, Ben, uh...smokes a cigar...and they all ride off in a Kirby-designed "flying bathtub" Fantasticar. It's a win all around in my book.

Here's how the page was published. Some of the middle pages were printed with a 3-D effect (whilst inside the Data Vortex, of course). My copy of the book didn't come with 3-D glasses, and I'm not really sure how those were distributed in the first place.

Even though it's not quite as impressive, I was able to add the first page of the story for almost nothing, so I grabbed it as well. At some point, the first panel was cut off and replaced with a second, finished version.

Although there's no Fantastic Four on this page, there is a really nice shot of a menacing M.O.D.O.K. Look at how surprised this office worker is! I sure hope that Hitachi Data Systems can get him out of this jam.

The establishing shot at the top of the page clearly shows the Baxter Building, which made this page worthwhile. The water in the distance doesn't really mesh with this being 42nd and Madison, but I'll let it slide. The Data Vortex messes with perspective sometimes. 

Pencils for this story were drawn by Allan Patrick and inks were added by Marcio Loezer. They gave it their all on what might otherwise be a throwaway promo story that not many people outside of the company have read. The line work is fine and detailed, and the FF are all on-model in their classic suits. I'm definitely glad to add these two pages to my collection.

The Thing is Marvel's best title! Here's some original art from Tom Reilly!

Let's take a minute to talk about how great Marvel's new Thing series is. The six-issue series, the character's first solo title since 2006, just wrapped up and I can't recommend picking this up highly enough.

Everything you love about the Thing is on display in this title. If you love the classic Thing - the good-hearted, brooding, never-say-die strongman, then you will love this book. If you love the more current interpretations of the Thing - the more polished, self-aware version, you will love this book! Walter Mosley, the best-selling crime novelist, seamlessly weaves new characters in with old favorites, adding to the title character's mythos while remaining true to his roots.

Artist Tom Reilly draws the Thing in a perfect blend of Kirby, Byrne and Wieringo. He makes him look tough without drawing him like a 12-foot, can't-fit-in-a-room monster. And he draws every page! All six issues are drawn by the same artist.

Does this series have team-ups? Yes! Does it have classic Fantastic Four characters? Yes! Does the Thing get all moody? Yes! Does the Thing punch a whole lot of people? YES! Let's look at some of the examples:

During one fight, the Thing punches a guy so hard his shirt blows up!

During another, he punches three villainous characters at once - including one with his head!

The Thing even manages to get his shots in at the Hulk! It really has a little bit of everything. You need to read this book!!

When Reilly announced that he would be selling some of his artwork from the series, I knew that I had to get a page. I ended up with two really amazing pieces from the series, and here they are for all to see!

This page is from the first issue of the series, and it features a lonely Ben Grimm wandering the expansive halls of an empty Baxter Building. Ben is taking a piece of material for Reed to analyze, and he trudges through the building's many different rooms to get to his destination. I love how moody all of these panels are, and they really lean into the FF's sci-fi background.

Here's our main character as he makes his way through his weight room...

...and finally he arrives in Reed's lab.

I love brooding Thing. It's part of his character, and it's that emotional resonance that makes the character so compelling. The shadows in this panel really hammer that home. Plus, check out that Kirby Krackle!

The next page is from the fourth issue, and is a full-page spread, albeit with a lot of empty space surrounding the relatively tiny characters. I absolutely love this one. But wait! If you look closely, you can kind of see more images on the other side of this page...

That's because, unbeknownst to me when I bought it, the Thing page was drawn on the back of another, entirely different page? I sent a message to Reilly to ask about it, and it seems that he simply ran out of blank pages while drawing the Thing series, so he drew the issue 4 spread on the back of a Crow pitch that he had taken to show off at conventions as a sample page. This was an unexpected bonus on an already great piece of art.

I know that it's probably hard to take my recommendation at face value, because I will read (and probably enjoy) just about anything Thing-related. But this series is truly a brilliant piece of superhero storytelling, and you honestly should run out and grab it right away. Everything there is to love about the Thing is in this six-issue series. I can only hope that a sequel is in the works!

original Ron Wilson art from The Thing #20!

Let's talk for a moment about how weird the 1980s solo Thing series got before it ended. The series started out as you might expect, chronicling the exploits of Ben Grimm directly following the end of the Marvel Two-in-One series. It served as a companion series of sorts to the main Fantastic Four title for most of its first year and, for the most part, told traditional superhero tales in familiar FF surroundings. But as 1984 and the event series Secret Wars came to be, the title changed in location and in tone relatively dramatically.

At the end of the Secret Wars series, the Thing makes the decision to stay on the Battleworld planet created by the Beyonder, ostensibly to explore this new planet. For about a year, the Thing series attempted to explore the psyche of Ben Grimm instead, though, taking on many qualities of a fantasy adventure comic. The Thing fought classic literary monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein, and he found that he could change to his human form (mostly) at will.

During this time, the Thing met and fell in love with Tarianna, a redheaded warrior who co-starred in the book for a while. As the stories got stranger and stranger, it was finally revealed that Ben Grimm's traumatized psyche was transforming the planet and everyone on it - and that he was creating all of the people who populated the world. There were monstrous versions of the Thing, a mysterious "Grimm the Sorcerer," a moloid-like band of Takers, and the aforementioned Tarianna, whom Ben created to be his ideal partner. He later learned that she was based on his memories of Sharon Ventura, later Ms. Marvel.

This sci-fi/fantasy approach to the Thing, once it came to an end after Grimm returned to New York and, eventually, the Fantastic Four, has rarely be revisited or even mentioned, despite, or perhaps because, its wild departure from what readers were familiar with. Plainly said, it was a really weird time for the Thing, as a character and a series.

I was recently able to purchase a page of original art from this strange period for our hero. Here is it below!

At first glance, this might not look like a page from The Thing, but as we just learned, looks can be deceiving. This page features artwork from Thing stalwart Ron Wilson, with inks from Mike Gustovich and letters by John Morelli.

Here's the cover from this issue, #20, with the Thing's red/black outfit that came with the boots I dislike so much. The cover date on this was February of 1985.

Tarianna is featured heavily on this page. In the story, she's been captured by Grimm the Sorcerer and, in her mind, is journeying through Ben Grimm's distorted past. Here she meets a young Grimm who has broken a familiar-looking toy.

The toy's bottom half is the only appearance of the Thing in his rocky, heroic form on this page, and it's a rather obvious attempt at some psychological symbolism, as Grimm's emotional trauma and desire to heal is on display. The final panel on this page directly precedes Tarianna's triumphant escape from the sorcerer's trap.

All in all, this might seem like an pretty unremarkable page, especially in the context of what we usually know the Thing for, but I am excited to own it, if for nothing else than to grab a page from what is undeniably the strangest period of the Thing's long history.

Here's a quick peek at the back of the page, with the requisite copyright information. It also looks like someone was trying to figure out how to properly spell the word "intrigue"...or maying "intriguing"? Anyway, that word doesn't appear anywhere on this particular page, so we'll just have to leave this...intriguing detail for some other time.

David Crane original comic strip artwork from Winslow Mortimer

In early November, I traveled to the Rhode Island Comic Con in Providence. The RICC was the last show I attended in 2019, so getting a table at this show in 2021 was an opportunity to start to feel like things were (maybe?) getting back to some semblance of normalcy. I sold some books and got some pictures, but I also grabbed some unusual original art from a comic strip I wasn't familiar with. Here's a scan!

I obviously have to learn to more seamlessly connect two halves of images in Photoshop, and I should probably try and flatten out that left edge, but what we have here is some art, dated December 31, 1962, from the comic strip "David Crane."

Not knowing anything about the strip, I was still drawn to this art for a few reasons, but mainly because the art is by Winslow Mortimer, a Silver Age comic artist who had notable contributions to a number of DC titles like Action Comics, Adventure Comics, Detective Comics and Superman Family.

The strip itself is mostly unremarkable from a story perspective. Despite Phil saying the word Larry twice, all that happens is one character showing another a car. The art is really lovely, though, and the car in the third panel (as well as Phil's sweater) has not just pencil and ink art, but also a sticker overlay that looks great despite being almost 60 years old.

I tried to find what I could on the comic strip, and it seems that it ran from 1956 to '72. Created by Mortimer, I've found a couple mentions of the artist leaving the strip in 1960. This strip and its 1962 copyright information would seem to dispute that, though I suppose it's possible that Mortimer had a backlog, or that this strip was printed in the Toronto Star at a later date. I'd welcome any other suppositions, if any David Crane expert out there would like to set the record straight.

For most of its run, David Crane was a light action/adventure strip with religious overtones, following a young pastor and his flock. It seems that toward the very end, the strip abandoned this storyline and became a more generic gag comic. And I'll just add this extra bit and see if I can confuse anyone: David Crane served as the inspiration to the Cheers and Frazier characters later on. Maybe? Sure.

It's also worth noting that, based on the writing in the left margins, this strip was #666 in the set. I know it's just a number, but it's kind of funny that of all the pages out there, I picked up lucky 666 from a comic strip about a handsome pastor.

There's a light impression of a stamp in the very bottom right corner of the page that really intrigues me. The image looks like it has a leaf or plant in the center, surrounded by several words, one of which is "artist." What this means, if it was just on the paper or specific to the comic strip, is something I'll probably never find out. But it's something I didn't notice until I took the scan of the full image.

I really like the look and presentation of comic strip art, and I've gotten a few recently. I think this is the oldest piece of original art that I now own. It's obscure as far as properties go, but I really enjoy having it.

Original Thing artwork from Andrea DiVito!

Did you know that the Thing will be getting his very own series once again this November? Walter Mosley and Tom Reilly are creating a five-issue limited series for the Idol O' Millions in a story titled "The Next Big Thing," and I, for one, can't wait. It's been too long since Ben Grimm has had his own solo series. In fact, you'd have to go back to 2006 and the Dan Slott/Andrea DiVito series for the last time the Thing had his own continuing series, even though that one only lasted eight issues.

Speaking of this series, I finally managed to get my hands on two pages of DiVito Thing original art, and it's time to take a look at both!

There's a lot going on in this page, for sure. But here it is.

The page comes from the third issue of the series, in which Ben and a few others are trapped by the X-Men villain Arcade - so the Hulk melee you see on the cover consists of Hulk robots. The Thing can beat them up, too.

It's easy to miss the Thing and some of the other detail on this page with a giant gorilla and dinosaur looming over everything, but rest assured, Ben Grimm is there, leading other prisoners to safety.

Also trapped in Arcade's word is the Constrictor, a villain who, uh, constricts things, presumably very hard.

The pencils on this page are incredibly tight and detailed. DiVito's Thing is a classic rendition with a prominent brow and and big, flat fingers, and I love it. Perhaps his Ben Grimm is a bit rounder than some others - his style always seemed to be the perfect mix between an on-model 1970s Thing and more modern interpretations. His proportions are a bit more realistic while also maintaining his comic book essence.

The next page comes from an issue of the Black Panther from a few years later. 

This comes from a period when Reed and Sue briefly left the team and were replaced by the Black Panther and Storm. In addition to appearing in the main Fantastic Four title, this team also had a story arc in the Black Panther book, traveling to a classic gangster Skrull world from a previous Lee/Kirby FF story.

It's been over a decade since I read this story, so I was surprised to learn that DiVito didn't pencil this page - he inked it over the pencils of Spanish artist Francis Portela. Still, it's obvious that DiVito had a big influence on this page. The Thing looks almost just as he does a few years prior in the Thing main series.

This page also features a lot of action, as the Thing battles various challengers in gladiator-style combat. It does not, however, feature the Black Panther, but what can you expect? The Thing is the most popular character in whatever book he appears. There's nothing you can do about it.

I might like the first page a little better than this one, but there's no denying that there's a lot going on here, and the Thing appears in almost every panel. Is that a power-dampening collar? How do those things work??

Here's one more piece of Thing pinup artwork I got at around the same time. This one's by artist Armando Carrillo, and it's a new piece even though it's drawn in the style of the 1994 Marvel Action Hour cartoon. This is probably more intimidating than cartoon Ben ever looked, and it makes a nice addition to my collection!